CSC 411 – Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

Ms. Regina Esi Turkson, PhD

(Mrs Regina Esi Segbefia, PhD)

Department of Computer Science and Information Technology

University of Cape Coast

Disclaimer!

The lecture slides are partially collected from the Internet for
educational purpose only. The lecturer does not claim any
credit for them and the copyrights belong to the original
authors.
o AI is a very broad field with many subareas

• We will cover many of the primary concepts/ideas.

We can’t cover everything
 Today’s Lecture

 Topics
 Course structure and policies
 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI)
 History of AI
W h a Is Artificial
t Intelligence ?
 Some Definitions (I)

The exciting new effort to make computers think …

machines with minds, in the full literal sense.
Haugeland, 1985
Some Definitions (II)

The study of mental faculties through the use

of computational models.
Charniak and McDermott,
1985

A field of study that seeks to explain and

emulate intelligent behavior in terms of
computational processes.
Schalkoff, 1990
Some Definitions (III)

The study of how to make

computers do things which, at
at
the moment, people better
are .

Rich & Knight, 1991

 What is intelligence?

• Intelligence:
o ―the capacity to learn and solve problems
o in particular,
• the ability to solve novel problems
• the ability to act rationally
• the ability to act like humans

• Artificial Intelligence
o build and understand intelligent entities or agents
o 2 main approaches: ―engineering versus ―cognitive
modeling
 What is Artificial Intelligence?

 It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent

computer
programs.
 It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI
does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable.
(John McCarthy, Stanford
 what is intelligence? University)
Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world. Varying kinds
and
degrees of intelligence occur in people, many animals and some machines.

Isn't there a solid definition of intelligence that doesn't depend on relating it to

human intelligence?
Not yet. The problem is that we cannot yet characterize in general what kinds of
computational procedures we want to call intelligent. We understand some of the
mechanisms of intelligence and not others.
 AI
 AI: logic & symbol manipulation
predicate
techniques
User
Inference Global
Question Engine Database

User Interface
Explanation
Facility
KB:•Fact
Response • rules
Knowledge
Knowledge Acquisition
Engineer
Human Expert Systems
Expert
AI and Soft
Computing

cat
Animal? cat
cut
Neural
character
recognition
knowledge
 Academic Disciplines important to AI.

• Mathematic Formal representation and proof, computation,

s (un)decidability, (in)tractability, probability.
algorithms,
• Economics Utility, decision theory, rational economic
agents
• Neuroscie Neurons as information processing units.

• nce How do people behave, perceive, process information,

Cognitive Science
Psychology/ represent knowledge.
• Computer
Building fast computers
engineering
• Control theory Design systems that maximize an objective function over
time
• Linguistic Knowledge representation, grammar
s
• Philosophy Logic, methods of reasoning, mind as physical system,
foundations of learning, language, rationality.
 History of AI
• 1943: early
o McCulloch & Pitts: Boolean circuit model of brain
beginnings
• 1950: Turing
o Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence“

• 1956: birth of AI
o Dartmouth meeting: "Artificial Intelligence“ name adopted

• 1950s: initial promise

o Early AI programs, including
o Samuel's checkers program
o Newell & Simon's Logic Theorist

• 1955-65: “great enthusiasm”

o Newell and Simon: GPS, general problem solver
o Gelertner: Geometry Theorem Prover
o McCarthy: invention of LISP
 History of AI cont.
• 1966—73: Reality dawns
o Realization that many AI problems are intractable
o Limitations of existing neural network methods identified
• Neural network research almost disappears

• 1969—85: Adding domain

knowledge
o Development of knowledge-based
systems
o Success of rule-based expert systems,
• E.g., DENDRAL,
• But were brittle and did not scale well in
MYCIN
practice
• 1986-- Rise of machine
learning
o Major advances in machine learning algorithms and applications
o Neural networks return to popularity

• 1990-- Role of uncertainty

o Bayesian networks as a knowledge representation framework

• 1995-- AI as Science
o Integration of learning, reasoning, knowledge representation
o AI methods used in vision, language, data mining, etc
 History of AI cont.
• 1943 McCulloch & Pitts: Boolean circuit model of
• 1950 brain
• 1956 Turing's "Computing Machinery and
adopted Intelligence"
• Dartmouth meeting: "Artificial Intelligence"
1950s

• 1965 Early AI programs, including Samuel's

• reasoning checkers
1966—73 program, Newell & Simon's Logic Theorist,
• Gelernter's Geometry Engine
1969—79 Robinson's complete algorithm for logical
•
• 1980--
1986-- AI discovers computational complexity
• Neural network research almost disappears
• 1987--
1995-- Early development of knowledge-based
systems
AI becomes an industry
Neural networks return to popularity
AI becomes a science
What’s involved in intelligence?
• Ability to interact with the real world
o to perceive, understand, and act
o e.g., speech recognition and understanding and
synthesis
o e.g., image understanding
o e.g., ability to take actions, have an effect

• Reasoning and Planning

o modeling the external world, given input
o solving new problems, planning, and making
decisions
o ability to deal with unexpected problems,
uncertainties
• Learning and Adaptation
o we are continuously learning and adapting
o our internal models are always being “updated”
• e.g., a baby learning to categorize and recognize
animals
 What’s involved in Intelligence? (again)

• Perceiving, understandin the real

recognizing, g
world
• Reasoning and planning about the external
world
• Learning and adaptation

• So what general principles should we use

to
achieve these goals?
Different Types of Artificial Intelligence

1. exactly how humans actually

Modeling think
2. exactly how humans actually
Modeling act
3. how ideal agents ― should think
Modeling
4. how ideal agents ― should act
Modeling
• Modern AI focuses on the last definition
o we will also focus on this “engineering” approach
o success is judged by how well the agent performs
 Acting humanly: Turing test

• Turing (1950) "Computing machinery and

intelligence“
• "Can machines think?"  "Can machines behave intelligently?”
• Operational test for intelligent behavior: the Imitation Game
 Acting humanly: Turing test

• Suggests major components required for AI:

- knowledge representation
- reasoning,
- language/image understanding,
- learning

* Question: is it important that an intelligent system act like a

human?
 The Origins of AI

• 1950 Alan Turing’s paper, Computing Machinery

and
Intelligence, described what is now called “The Turing Test”.

• Turing predicted that in about fifty years "an

average
interrogator
making the will not have more than a 70 percent
identification chance
five of
minutes
right
questioning" after of
.

• 1957 Newell and Simon predicted that "Within ten

years a
computer will be the world's chess champion."
 Turing test
AI system

Experimenter

Control
 The Chinese Room
She does not
know
Chinese
Correct
Chinese Responses
Writing is
given to the
person
Set of rules, in
English, for
transformin
g phrases
 The Chinese Room

• So imagine an individual is locked in a room and given a batch of

Chinese writing.
• The person locked in the room does not understand Chinese. Next he is given
more Chinese writing and a set of rules (in English which he understands) on
how to collate the first set of Chinese characters with the second set Chinese
characters

• Suppose the person gets so

good at manipulating the
Chinese symbols and the rules
• are so good, that to those
outside the room it appears
• that the person understands
Chinese.
Searle's point is that, he doesn't really understand Chinese, it really only
intelligent, it is
following a set of rules.
manipulating symbols that it really only the semantic
understand
Following this argument,
doesn't context.
a computer could never be truly
Newell and Simon
Prediction

In 1997, Deep Blue beat Gary

Kasparov.
 Can Computers beat Humans at Chess?

• Chess Playing is a classic AI

problem
o well-defined problem
o very complex: difficult for humans to play well
3000
2800
2600 Human World Champion Deep Blue

2400
Points Ratings

Deep Thought
2200
Ratings
2000
1800
1600
1400
1200

1966 1971 1976 1981 1986 1991 1997

• Conclusion:
o YES: today’s computers can beat even the best human

•Deep Blue defeated the reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov
in 1997
 Can Computers play Humans at Chess?

• Chess Playing is a classic AI problem

o well-defined problem
o very complex: difficult for humans to play well

3000
2800 Garry Kasparov (current World Champion ) Deep Blue
2600
2400 D
Deep Thought
2200
Points Ratings

Ratings
2000
1800
1600
1400
1200
1966 1971 1976 1981 1986 1991 1997

• Conclusion: YES: today’s can beat even

computers
the best human
 Can Computers Talk?

• This is known as “speech synthesis”

o translate text to phonetic form
• e.g., “fictitious” -> fik-tish-es
o use pronunciation rules to map phonemes to actual sound
• e.g., “tish” -> sequence of basic audio sounds

• Difficulties
o sounds made by this “lookup” approach sound unnatural
o sounds are not independent
• e.g., “act” and “action”
• modern systems (e.g., at AT&T) can handle this pretty well
o a harder problem is emphasis, emotion, etc
• humans understand what they are saying
• machines don’t: so they sound unnatural

• Conclusion:
o NO, for complete sentences
o YES, for individual words
 Can Computers Recognize Speech?

• Speech Recognition:
o mapping sounds from a microphone into a list of
words
o classic problem in AI, very difficult

• Recognizing single words from a small

vocabulary
• systems can do this with high accuracy (order of 99%)
• e.g., directory inquiries
o limited vocabulary (area codes, city names)
o computer tries to recognize you first, if unsuccessful hands
you over to a human operator
o saves millions of dollars a year for the phone companies
 Recognizing human speech (ctd.)

• Recognizing normal speech is much more

difficult
o speech is continuous: where are the boundaries between
words?
• e.g., “John’s car has a flat tire”
o large vocabularies
• can be many thousands of possible words
• we can use context to help figure out what someone said
“I would
o e.g., like some
hypothesize and cream
test and sugar in my coffee”
o background noise, a
o try telling other speakers,
waiter accents, colds, etc
in a restaurant:
o on normal speech, modern systems are only about 60-70%
accurate
• Conclusion:
o NO, normal speech is too complex to accurately recognize
o YES, for restricted problems (small vocabulary, single
speaker)
 Can Computers Learn and Adapt ?

• Learning and Adaptation

o consider a computer learning to drive on the freeway
o we could code lots of rules about what to do
o and/or we could have it learn from experience
Darpa’s Grand Challenge. Stanford’s “Stanley”
drove
150 without supervision in the Majove dessert

o machine learning allows computers to learn to do things without

explicit programming

• Conclusion: YES, computers can learn and

adapt, when presented with information in
the appropriate way
 Can Computers “see”?

• Recognition v. Understanding (like

Speech)
o Recognition and Understanding of Objects in a scene
• look around this room
• you can effortlessly recognize objects
• human brain can map 2d visual image to 3d “map”
• Why is visual recognition a hard
problem?

• Conclusion:
o mostly NO: computers can only “see” certain types of objects under
limited circumstances
o YES for certain constrained problems (e.g., face recognition)
 Can Computers plan and make decisions?
• Intelligence
o involves solving problems and making decisions and plans
o e.g., you want to visit your cousin in Boston
• you need to decide on dates, flights
• you need to get to the airport, etc
• involves a sequence of decisions, plans, and actions

• What makes planning hard?

o the world is not predictable:
• your flight is canceled or there’s a backup on the
405
o there is a potentially huge number of details
• do you consider all flights? all dates?
o no: commonsense constrains your solutions
o AI systems are only successful in constrained planning
problems
• Conclusion: NO, real-world planning and
decision-
making is still beyond the capabilities of modern
computers
o exception: very well-defined, constrained problems: mission
planning for
satelites.
 Summary of State of AI Systems in Practice

• Speech synthesis, recognition and

understanding
o very useful for limited vocabulary applications
o unconstrained speech understanding is still too
• hard
Computer vision
o works for constrained problems (hand-written zip-
codes)
o understanding real-world, natural scenes is still too
hard
• Learning
o adaptive systems are used in many applications: have their
limits
• Planning and Reasoning
o only works for constrained problems: e.g.,
chess
o real-world is too complex for general
systems
• Overall:
o many components of intelligent systems are “doable”
o there are many interesting research problems
remaining
 Intelligent Systems in Your Everyday Life

• Post Office
o automatic address recognition and sorting of mail

• Banks
o automatic check readers, signature verification systems
o automated loan application classification

• Telephone Companies
o automatic voice recognition for directory inquiries

• Credit Card Companies : automated fraud detection

• Computer Companies: automated diagnosis for help-desk applications

• Netflix: movie recommendation

• Google: Search Technology

 AI Applications: Consumer Marketing

• Have you ever used any kind of credit/ATM/store card while shopping?
o if so, you have very likely been “input” to an AI algorithm

• All of this information is recorded digitally

• Companies like Nielsen gather this information weekly and search for
patterns
o general changes in consumer behavior
o tracking responses to new products
o identifying customer segments: targeted marketing, e.g., they find out that consumers with sports cars
who buy textbooks respond well to offers of new credit cards.
o Currently a very hot area in marketing

• How do they do this?

o Algorithms (“data mining”) search data for patterns
o based on mathematical theories of learning
o completely impractical to do manually
 AI Applications: Identification Technologies
• ID cards
o e.g., ATM cards
o can be a nuisance and security risk:
• cards can be lost, stolen, passwords forgotten, etc

• Biometric
Identification
o walk up to a locked door
• camera
• fingerprint device
• microphone
• iris scan
o computer uses your biometric signature for
identification
• face, eyes, fingerprints, voice pattern, iris pattern
 AI Applications: Predicting the Stock Market

Value of
the Stock ?

time in days
• The Problem
Prediction
o given the past, predict the future
o very difficult problem!
o we can use learning algorithms to learn a predictive model from
data
historical
• prob(increase at day t+1 | values at day t, t-1,t-2....,t-k)
o such models are routinely used by banks and financial traders to manage
portfolios worth millions of
dollars
 AI-Applications: Machine Translation

• Language problems in international business

o e.g., at a meeting of Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Swedish investors, no common
language
o or: you are shipping your software manuals to 127 countries
o solution; hire translators to translate
o would be much cheaper if a machine could do this!

• How hard is automated translation

o very difficult!
o e.g., English to Russian
o “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” (English)
o “the vodka is good but the meat is rotten” (Russian)
o not only must the words be translated, but their meaning also!

• Nonetheless....
o commercial systems can do a lot of the work very well (e.g., restricted vocabularies in software documentation)
o algorithms which combine dictionaries, grammar models, etc.
o see for example babelfish.altavista.com